Okay, I’ve been wanting to see this for a while now. It’s
never been available on DVD, and it’s hard to find on VHS. I guess the print
that Universal had was incomplete, or in bad shape or something, because
according to the Criterion Collection, they had to assemble this from several
different sources to present it complete. You wouldn’t be able to tell it,
though…it all looks great.
Anyway, here’s the situation: Edward Parker, a guy on his
way to meet his fiancé, gets dumped from a cargo ship by the drunk asshat
captain jerk, and he winds up being taken to the first port of call – the island
of Dr. Moreau. When he gets there, he spots all of these weird-looking guys
running around in the jungle, but can only catch a glimpse. Dr. Moreau
introduces him to Lota, the only female on the island, and they hit it off even
though he’s got a girlfriend already (who is getting pretty mad that Parker
hasn’t shown up yet, has found out what happened, and is on her way to Moreau’s
island). Parker finds out that Moreau has created the island’s natives by
experimenting on animals shipped to the island by the cargo ship he was on earlier.
Parker keeps getting left alone with Lota, who is falling for
him. But see, Moreau has created her from a panther, and wants to see if she’s
capable of displaying human emotion and having human kids, so he’s trying to
get Parker and her to mate. Eventually, Lota kisses Parker, and as they hug,
Parker feels claws on his back – her claws. She’s growing panther hands back,
and Parker freaks right the fuck out. He yells at Moreau at how disgusting his
experiments are, and Moreau decides to “burn the animal out of her,” which
sounds HORRIBLE. About this time, Parker’s fiancé shows up, and they plan on
leaving. When Moreau finds this out, he orders one of the beast-men to kill the
captain that brought Parker’s fiancé to the island. This breaks one of the laws
that Moreau has laid down (“What is the law? Not to spill blood!”), and the
beast-men decide to revolt, realizing that Moreau can die, too. In the revolt, Lota
is killed and Parker and his fiancé escape as the natives take Moreau into his
laboratory (the “House of Pain”) and proceed to rip him to shreds.
It’s taken me a while to put this review together, and it’s
because it’s taken that long for me to put together the right words for it. For
when it was made, this movie is REALLY disturbing. There’s a lot of implied
stuff about surgery on the beast-men that Moreau does without anesthesia, a
whole bestiality thing with Lota and Parker maybe eventually hooking up,
Charles Laughton as Moreau enjoying playing with his whip a whole hell of a
lot, and a lot of beast-men (led by Bela Lugosi as the Sayer of the Law!!!) going
around like they’re in total agony the whole time. This pushes things a lot
more than FRANKENSTEIN did the same year, and wound up banned in a bunch of
countries.
But here’s the thing that’s kept eating at me. There was something
about the movie that I just couldn’t put my finger on that was bothering me. At
first, I was just thinking that the movie was just so good at being a horror
movie that it kept making me think about it. But after reading the
essay that’s in the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of this, I think they put a
finger on what it is…it’s that the movie is all about Black folks hooking up
with White folks. It’s easy to see Moreau, in his white suit and carrying his
whip, as a slave master, with a bunch of “savages” living in the area away from
the estate, and with a select few serving him in his home. And he’s all curious
from a Mad Scientist point of view to see what will happen when the “savage”
woman (that he’s passing off as a “pure Polynesian”) mates with the new White
guy on the island. And while I guess it’s good that they try to show that the “savages”
deserve as much respect as anybody else (or at least that they don’t deserve to
be cut open on operating tables while they’re still freaking AWAKE), they’re
still not even human, but closer to
animals. And when you add in this whole thing about how revolting it is that he’s
experimenting with having a “savage” mate with a visiting White Guy, it just
gets all kinds of creepy. I mean, Moreau wants Parker to have kids with Lota so
he can see if they’re more “human” than Lota is, and as someone from an
interracial marriage, I guess maybe I take it kind of personally.
It’s obvious that the movie is a classic among horror movies, because it does what it does REALLY WELL.
And when I first saw it, it blew me away because it stuck with me for days. But
the more and more I think about it, the more and more it bothers me. Dad keeps
telling me that this was 1932 and that I should remember that things were a LOT
different back then, but there’s so much about it that bothers me that I don’t
think I can watch it again. I’d never say that nobody else should see it. I
think it’s important to know how bad things used to be, at least as some kind
of WARNING or something. And if some people can get over the really weird
issues it seems to have and enjoy it as something that’s come from the views
people might have had back then, then that’s great. There are a lot of things
from back then that you have to look at like that (like DUMBO, or some old Bugs
Bunny or Mickey Mouse cartoons). And some of that stuff I can even get past
because it’s so ridiculous. But this one, over the past few days, has just
gotten more and more under my skin.
I’ve had a lot of talks over the weekend with my dad
about this. It’s really weird for him that he’d want to talk with me about a single
movie for days, but he says that it’s important that we have these talks, and
that if the movie has led to us talking about it, that it’s done something
positive in the end. I guess that’s true. I just wish that we didn’t have to
have these talks in the first place, you know? Dad says I should be optimistic,
and that maybe one day we’ll all be living in a time where this kind of thing
doesn’t matter any more, and we can just look at a movie like this as a
reminder of a long time ago when people got all worked up about who was gonna
be screwing who. If so, it’s taking its damn time getting here.
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